Does government policy need a digital reboot
It feels like there is a growing disconnect between the pace of technological change and the readiness of government policy teams to respond. Nowhere is this more evident than in the release of the Government’s AI Strategy—a document widely seen by the tech community as lightweight and incomplete. While it gestures in the right direction, it lacks the depth, urgency, and vision required to steer Aotearoa through an era where artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and cybersecurity are reshaping the foundations of our economy and society.
And this isn't an isolated issue. The recent announcement that the government will scrap NCEA and return to a more traditional exam-based system—essentially the model in place when I was at school over 30 years ago—is another stark example of policy reaching for the comfort of the past instead of preparing us for the future. It’s a move that misses an opportunity to build a modern education system fit for new ways of learning, new industries, and new kinds of jobs.
This isn’t a criticism of policy professionals themselves. In my experience—particularly during my time on various ministerial advisory groups—I’ve seen firsthand the dedication, skill, and genuine intent of those working in policy. They are brilliant, well intended and committed to doing the right thing. But they are operating within an outdated frame. They are writing rules for a world that no longer exists.
The CSAC (cyber security advisory committee) tried to draw analogies to help with understanding—comparing digital perimeter security to the physical border security or of government buildings—we found these analogies were only helpful to a point. The real world doesn’t translate neatly into the digital. It’s more complex, more abstract, and moves much faster. But if we want to protect our national infrastructure, our data, our economy, and our people, policy teams need to deeply understand the nature of that complexity. We need to stop writing yesterday’s policies for tomorrow’s world.
What Needs to Change
If Aotearoa is serious about becoming a future-ready, digitally resilient nation, then policy capability must evolve. This isn’t just about understanding AI or cybersecurity in isolation—it’s about seeing the interconnectedness across all of government. We need policy advisors who are digitally fluent, not just digitally aware.
It’s encouraging to see some New Zealand organisations embracing this shift. Air New Zealand’s appointment of Nikhil Ravishankar—formerly their Chief Digital Officer—as CEO is a powerful signal. It shows that digital isn’t just a support function; it’s central to how modern organisations operate, innovate, and deliver value. When digital capability is represented at the top table, it influences strategy, culture, and resilience. That’s the kind of future-focused leadership we need more of—across business and government.
Key areas where government policy professionals could use some upskilling include:
Digital infrastructure and architecture: Understanding how modern systems are built, integrated, and maintained—including cloud, data platforms, APIs, and open standards.
Cybersecurity beyond compliance: Knowing how security works in practice, not just how to tick the risk register box. This includes threat modelling, encryption, digital identity, and resilience.
AI and algorithmic transparency: Moving beyond the hype to understand how AI models are trained, who trains them, and how bias and risk are embedded—or mitigated.
Data governance and sovereignty: Grasping the nuance of who controls, owns, and accesses data, and the implications for Māori data sovereignty, individual privacy, and economic value.
Tech-driven service delivery: Understanding what good digital public services look like—and what happens when they fail. Designing policy with delivery in mind.
Intersections of ethics, regulation, and innovation: Balancing the need to protect with the need to enable. Knowing when to regulate, and when to support safe experimentation.
New ways of learning and capability-building: Embracing continuous, adaptive learning approaches—microcredentials, peer-based learning, on-the-job immersion, and real-time collaboration with technologists.
This isn’t an exhaustive list.
Why This Matters
If we don’t address this capability gap, we’ll continue to produce strategies that sound good but aren’t taking us forward. We’ll fall further behind in a world increasingly shaped by those who understand and build digital systems. Worse, we’ll expose our citizens to unnecessary risks—poor service delivery, weak security, under-regulated tech, and missed opportunities.
The education announcement this week is a cautionary tale. Instead of doubling down on future-focused learning we’re focusing on the framework not the outcomes. Unfortunately in this scenario we risk producing workers for jobs that won’t exist while neglecting the industries that urgently need talent.
The public sector doesn’t need to become a technology business—but it does need to become a smart customer, a thoughtful regulator, and an adaptive policymaker. That means building teams who can think critically about emerging tech, who understand how digital transformation actually happens, and who can co-design policy with those at the forefront of these changes.
When policy professionals and technologists collaborate—really collaborate—great things happen. But first, we need to get on the same page. That means rethinking how we build capability inside government, investing in training, secondments, partnerships, and most importantly, in a new mindset.
Lets reorient our policy and regulation framing for a future world that is charging towards us at pace.
